Print production environments, such as print shops, often experience high variability in job volume, job mix, job arrivals, labor skills and equipment. This variability tends to pose challenges to the production environment achieving optimal utilization of resources and performance.
In an effort to mitigate the effects of variability in a production environment, operators of a production environment may be cross-trained to handle different tasks, which may provide the production environment with labor flexibility. While cross training operators has shown significant improvement in operations, a tradeoff exists between the level of flexibility in the system and the associated cost of operations.
Currently, labor cross-training in many production environments is performed manually and ad hoc, which results in high training costs and poor labor operating conditions.